British actor and Academy Award winner Colin Firth is set to lead the cast in a forthcoming submarine disaster thriller called Kursk. The film will be directed by Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt) from a screenplay from Saving Private Ryan scribe Robert Rodat, adapted from the novel “A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy by Robert Moore.” Matthias Schoenaerts, who we last saw in A Bigger Splash earlier this year will is also in talks to appear.
Here’s a little about the story from the book’s official synopsis.
At 11:28 a.m. on Saturday, August 12, 2000, high in the Arctic Circle under the roiling surface of the unforgiving Barents Sea, Captain Gennady Lyachin was taking the Kursk, the pride of Russia’s elite Northern Fleet, through the last steps of firing a practice torpedo, part of an elaborate naval exercise. Suddenly, the torpedo exploded in a massive fireball, instantly incinerating all seven men in the submarine’s forward compartment. The horror, however, was just beginning. The full, gripping story of the remarkable drama inside the Kursk and of the desperate rescue efforts has never been told—until now.
In “A Time to Die,” a critically acclaimed best-seller in the United Kingdom, international reporter Robert Moore—who covered the Kursk tragedy from Russia as it happened—draws on exclusive access he obtained to top Russian military figures in telling the inside story of the disaster with the factual depth of the best journalism and the compelling moment-by-moment tension of a thriller. He takes us right down inside the Kursk as two massive explosions—the second measuring 3.5 on the Richter scale—rip through compartment after compartment. Bringing the horror of the explosions vividly to life, he details the agonizing drama of the twenty-three men who survived as they fight against time to be rescued.
The book was published in 2003. No more news as yet, but we’ll update you as soon as we get any more information.
